An Appropriate Birthday Present, I Believe

Happy birthday, Alice Walker! She is an author and poet, best known for her novel The Color Purple, but she is also a committed activist, seeking understanding and justice in many arenas, who "believes that learning to extend the range of our compassion is activity and work available to all."

So I'm guessing she's fully in support of this - Vandals sentenced to read books about racism and antisemitism:

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner are among a list of 35 books a group of five vandals have been ordered to read, after they were found guilty of covering a historic African American schoolhouse with racist, antisemitic and obscene graffiti....Each month, the teenagers must file either a book report or substitute three of the books for a film review. They also have to write a paper to explain the message that swastikas and white-power symbols send and visit the Holocaust museum and the American history museum to see an exhibition about the internment of Japanese people during the second world war.

I love it. It makes sense to have a restorative justice system - one that looks for the root of injustice and attempts to dig it out through encouraging empathy, reform, and reconciliation, rather than a vindictive system focused on punishment rather than correction.

Also, the list of books - which is given in the article linked above - is a great list of books, and recommended reading for everyone. Take a look (and add the ones you haven't read to your TBR pile):

The list of books:

1. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
2. Native Son by Richard Wright
3. Exodus by Leon Uris
4. Mitla 18 by Leon Uris
5. Trinity by Leon Uris
6. My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
7. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
8. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
9. Night by Elie Wiesel
10. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
11. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
12. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
13. Things Falls Apart by Chinua Achebe
14. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
15. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
16. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
17. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
18. Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
19. Tortilla Curtain by TC Boyle
20. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
21. A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind
22. Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas
23. Black Boy by Richard Wright
24. The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates
25. Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
26. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
27. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
28. The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
29. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
30. The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
31. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
32. Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
33. Too Late the Phalarope by Alan Paton
34. A Dry White Season by Andre Brink
35. Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides

Pretty picture time!

Sugar

And: Links!

• Library Land
• The Met Makes 375,000 Public Domain Images Available "The image collection covers photographs, paintings, and sculptures, among other works. Images now available for both scholarly and commercial purposes include Emanuel Leutze's famous painting Washington Crossing the Delaware; photographs by Walker Evans, Alfred Steiglitz, and Dorothea Lange; and even some Vincent van Gogh paintings." Yay!
• Meet the slave who escaped from George Washington's Philly mansion and was never caught  "Dunbar tells the story in a new book, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge..."
• Health, Science, & Technology
• Scientists Measure Highest Radiation Levels Yet Inside Fukushima's Damaged Reactors "Luckily, there is no indication that the radiation is leaking outside the reactor." 
• We finally have a computer that can survive the surface of Venus 
• Bees are dying out, which I hate. Pollinating drones could replace them, so that crops still grow. 
• U.S. News
• Exploratory drilling allowed in Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park Further corporate encroachment on public land. Gross. 
• Speaking of drilling: Company Resumes Work to Finish Dakota Access Pipeline; Legal Challenge Filed 
• U.S. Visitors May Have to Hand Over Social Media Passwords  "As well as asking people for their passwords, Kelly said he was looking at trying to obtain people's financial records." It's almost like privacy should go on the Endangered Species list.  
• Related: Canadian woman denied entry to U.S. after Muslim prayers found on her phone "Fadwa Alaoui is a Moroccan-born Canadian citizen living in Brossard, Quebec. Like a lot of Quebecers, she sometimes drives down to Vermont to take advantage of the deals. But on Saturday, when her family pulled up at the border, Alaoui encountered something new. After the usual set of questions, Alaoui was asked about her religion and her thoughts on U.S. President Donald Trump. Border agents took her phone and fingerprints. Four hours later she was told that her family wasn't welcome and she was forced to turn back."
• Muslim U.S. Olympian Ibtihaj Muhammad says she was held by U.S. Customs 
• Spicer claims he ‘clearly meant Orlando’ after citing mystery Atlanta terrorist attack three times  That...still doesn't make sense, though. With the list of Boston, San Bernardino, and Orlando, you still have attackers who were "self-radicalized in the United States and had no direct ties to any terrorist organizations...." None had ties to any of the countries actually covered by the ban nor to each other; the only thing they had in common was their faith. But I'm sure that's not why the Pres et al. are lumping them together. Also, this 'repetitive misspeaking' is a terrible habit Trump's spokespersons have developed.
• Is ethics even a thing anymore? Should we add it to the Endangered Species list, too?  
• Under-the-radar change to congressional ethics watchdog may weaken it  "This subtle change — requiring the two parties to 'consult' on new board members instead of 'concur' — is raising concerns among accountability and ethics organizations, which say it could make the OCE more vulnerable to partisanship and, in the process, weaken its investigations of misconduct by lawmakers."
• Defense Department Renting At Trump Tower Is Another Step Into Ethical Murk Trump likes swamps and murky places, though, so I'm sure he'll tell us it's all just peachy-keen, folks! 
• Conway may have broken key ethics rule by touting Ivanka Trump’s products, experts say
  

  Federal employees are banned from using their public office to endorse products, regulations state.
  
  Conway, speaking to “Fox & Friends” viewers from the White House briefing room, was responding to boycotts of Ivanka Trump merchandise and Nordstrom’s discontinuation of stocking her clothing and shoe lines...
  
  “I’m going to give it a free commercial here,” Conway said of the president’s daughter’s merchandise brand. “Go buy it today.”

• US court upholds Obama-era retirement advice rule "A U.S. federal judge on Wednesday upheld an Obama-era rule designed to avoid conflicts of interests when brokers give retirement advice, in a possible setback for President Donald Trump's efforts to scale back government regulation.The stinging 81-page ruling comes just days after Trump ordered the Labor Department to review the 'fiduciary' rule — a move widely interpreted as an effort to delay or kill the regulation."
• Trump’s faux-pas diplomacy "President Donald Trump spent much of a recent phone call with French President Francois Hollande veering off into rants about the U.S. getting shaken down by other countries....At one point, Trump declared that the French can continue protecting NATO, but that the U.S. 'wants our money back,' the official said, adding that Trump seemed to be 'obsessing over money.'" Someone tell the Pres that the job description isn't "blow up all the alliances", please!
• Is a strong dollar good or bad? An answer for Donald Trump.
  

  A leak to S.V. Date and Christina Wilkie of the Huffington Post reveals that on one recent night, President Trump was up at 3 am and decided to call up National Security Advisor Michael Flynn to ask him about this.

  Trump, they report, “was confused about the dollar: Was it a strong one that’s good for the economy? Or a weak one?”

  Flynn reportedly “told Trump he didn’t know, that it wasn’t his area of expertise, that, perhaps, Trump should ask an economist instead.”

  TL;DR - Depends on what he wants out of it. 
• Trump attacks McCain for questioning success of deadly Yemen raid Apparently, one should not criticize military ops, as it "emboldens the enemy".  
• Appeals Court Declines to Reinstate Trump’s Travel Ban Trump took it about as well as you'd expect by this point, lashing out on Twitter, as is his wont. There is a process for crafting executive orders; Trump didn't follow it: How Trump’s travel ban broke from the normal executive order process 
• Arizona mom at center of immigration fight has been deported, attorney says Someone is going to have to explain to me how a woman who has lived in the U.S. most of her life, who has a husband and underage children here, and who was trying to do everything by the book, is a threat to national security and needs to be forced away from her family and home and deported. 
• House votes to scale back GI Bill housing stipend for military kids "A House Veterans Affairs Committee spokesman noted that the cuts are less drastic than those recommended by the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission, which called for a complete elimination of housing stipends for both military spouses and children using the GI Bill." 
• International
• Child migrants: UK to end 'Dubs amendment' commitment  "In a written ministerial statement, the Home Office said it would stop receiving children via the so-called Dubs amendment at the end of March.The law, designed by peer and former refugee Lord Dubs, aimed to help some of the estimated 90,000 unaccompanied migrant children across Europe."
• Related: Archbishop of Canterbury's statement on child refugees 
• Brexiteers condemned for not backing £350m NHS amendment to EU withdrawal bill "Brexiteers who claimed the NHS would receive an extra £350m after Brexit have been condemned for voting down an amendment demanding an analysis of the impact of exiting the EU on the health service." It's almost as though there were a political trend of making huge promises and not being able to show how exactly you're going to keep them. 
• Isis claims it attacked Israeli port of Eilat with rockets launched from Egypt 
• Othernesses
• Archaeologists Might Have Found Another Dead Sea Scroll Cave Sadly, it seems to have been looted, and any scrolls it contained stolen.